


Of No Consequence at All

by Culumacilinte



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Post-Last of the Time Lords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-22
Updated: 2008-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-15 03:03:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/pseuds/Culumacilinte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucy Cole had never fancied herself the part of the widow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of No Consequence at All

Lucy Cole had never fancied herself the part of the widow. Sackcloth and mourning, weeping and carrying on. It didn’t suit her.

Except that now she was Lucy Saxon, and she was a widow, and there was no one in the world who remembered her face. It would have been the thing to do to visit her husband’s pyre and weep, but she couldn’t manage the tears as she stood and choked on the smoke that still hung in the air. Dry-eyed, she found his ring amidst the ashes, and quietly pocketed it before leaving.

Harry had never stood for sentimentality, after all.

She cried on television, at the state funeral for Harold Saxon. The consummate actress, as always. A few pale, perfect tears down her pale, perfect cheeks behind the gauze veil, but even as she wept, she was wearing his ring under her black velvet gloves (she’d been so tempted to wear leather, but had turned away at the last moment), and she clutched it tight and angry against her skin.

There were words of comfort, of course, from friends as well as complete strangers. So sorry for your loss, Lady Saxon, he was a great man. My sympathies. Oh poor Lucy- I can’t believe it. But none of them knew who Harry was, and their comfort meant nothing to Lucy, who accepted it with empty eyes and an attempt at a smile.

She wanted to kill sometimes, just to remind herself of how it felt with Harry, standing on top of the world and dancing as humanity choked on its own blood. She imagined finding a young man at a club, someone youthful and beautiful, pleased and smug to have picked up a woman like Lucy. She imagined breaking his neck. Oh, how surprised he would look, poor thing, pretty young eyes wide and glassy against the grit of some seedy alleyway, somewhere no one would ever think to find the youngest child of Lord Cole of Tarminster.

But she never did. She was still a coward, in ways, as much as she hated it.

Her co-workers found her quiet and pale, but otherwise unchanged. Lucy’s sorrow was not a matter for public consumption, and she would not permit it to be the topic of workplace gossip. Let them think her a heartless bitch if that was what it meant. She didn’t care. They were hardly worth her notice anyway. Just humans, after all. Stupid, blind apes.

There was only one who understood. One, perhaps, who grieved as she did, grieved for the Master instead of for Harold Saxon. There never was a Harold Saxon, after all; who was there to grieve for? But he had the whole of time and space to scream his sorrow to; Lucy had nothing and nowhere. She sometimes thought to seek him out; to find him, just so she could rail and cry and weep like she couldn’t now. Because who else was there for her to go to? But no. Lucy had her pride; she was not about to go running into the arms of the Doctor, of all men, not about to soak those absurd pinstripes with her tears. That’s just what he’d want. He’d mistake it, perhaps, for repentance, and whatever Lucy might be, she was not repentant.

Still though, she was unsurprised one night, returning from one of the clubs she so often frequented, to find a familiar blue police box sitting in one of those seedy alleyways where she never killed any young men. The Doctor leaned against the wall next to it, hands shoved in his pockets, and met her eyes in a way that suggested that he thought himself dreadfully serious. Lucy had to restrain herself from flying at him tooth and nail.

‘Mrs. Saxon,’ he said.

‘Doctor,’ she answered.

He regarded her thoughtfully; in some ways, it was cousin to the way Harry used to look at her, as if she was a puzzle it amused him to solve. But there was no amusement in the Doctor’s eyes, merely a great weight, a tired sort of sorrow. ‘Lucy,’ he started, ‘I know you-’ But Lucy cut him off before he could even begin to finish.

‘I’m afraid not, Doctor. Now, if you’ll forgive me.’ And she brushed past him, her mouth a tight line that belied her cool tone. She didn’t know what he wanted, and she didn’t particularly care. It was because of the Doctor that she was poor, widowed Mrs. Saxon, and she would not do him the honour of granting him her presence.

She didn’t hear the grinding of the TARDIS departing as she walked away, heels clicking on the cobblestones, and bristled a little at the idea of the Doctor just standing there, watching her as she left.

She allowed herself a glass of chardonnay when she got home, and several moments of staring off into space, not really noticing when her fingers began to drum a familiar quadruple beat on the countertop. And then to bed, curling into herself and burying her face in her pillows as though she was a little girl, her whole body tight with anger and sorrow and exhaustion.

After she fell asleep, she imagined, in a half-dreaming sort of way, that she could hear the familiar noise of the TARDIS’s time rotor. But she didn’t remember it in the morning, and she couldn’t place the vague feeling of disappointment that lingered around the edges of her thought. Just another morning, that was all.


End file.
